Prime Rate Credit

You know when that time comes. When you receive a credit card statement and your heart drops when you see the amount of interest you’ve been charged for one month has gone up considerably, even though your charges haven’t. That’s when you know, it’s time to start comparison shopping for some new credit cards that won’t puncture a hole in your wallet simply by using them for the necessities, and times when you may be financially strapped and need to borrow a little money from yourself, so to speak.

I reached that point, a couple of times in my earlier days of playing the credit card game. A statement would come in the mail, I’d be pretty mad about how much interest I was being charged, and the fact that I knew they had just consistently jacked it my whole stay with them, simply because they knew they could probably get away with it.

Let’s face it, I didn’t have the best credit, and I was kind of a captive audience to some of my credit cards because there was simply no other way to survive without them. I had to pay the outrageous APR’s, because no other credit card companies would give me good intro offers at that time. Now, things have a changed a little.

Even with questionable credit, you have the power of the internet at your fingertips, so you can search hundreds of credit card offers that are all battling for your business, and so will offer you the most competitive APR’s and overall interest rates or rewards to get and maintain your business. It is truly a buyer’s market out there for credit card deals, but you have to know what a good deal and bad deal is when it comes to the credit card game.

Talk about everyone’s worst nightmare. Can you imagine, saving for your retirement for 25 or even 35-40 years, having a huge balance in your retirement account, and not even believing that you actually accomplished saving this much money, the most money you’ve ever had at your disposal.

Then, imagine, one morning, you wake up, you check your retirement account balance, and it’s all gone, not a penny of it is left. And you know that you did not withdraw that money. Well, apparently 401k and retirement fund theft is now the latest scam for thief hackers to prey on hard working people now.

Think about it, retirement funds are the best way for a hacker to get large sums of money at once, and the security measures in place currently for someone to drain an account without red flags being raised, frankly needs work to me, for accounts with such high balances and so much for hard workers to lose (their life savings, try). I just read a story about a man who saved for 25 years, and had close to $200 thousand dollars saved for his and his wife’s retirement, which they planned to start enjoying in the next few years.

He checked his account one day and the whole account had been drained by some savvy hacker who covered their tracks by changing his deposit account, extracting all the money, then changing the payment account back to his account number. His story had a happy ending, because the investigation actually yielded them the crook and they were able to recover the funds (the generous company even offered to honor any market gains he would have recieved had the money never been stolen.

But not all these stories will have such a happy ending. The problem is, right now there are not really any backup plans or insurance plans in place for retirement accounts, protecting people from ruthless scum who would just invade and deplete an account overnight.

In other words, if someone hacks your credit card information, you can deny the charges, and you are actually insured against credit card fraud, whereas with this type of identity theft, the companies are not required to reimburse you for anything. Like I said, it’s a good thing that this guy had a happy ending, but this could indeed have turned very ugly.

A credit card company known as “Buy Right” offers fast approval credit cards specifically meant for people with bad credit, and I believe they particularly specialize in prepaid credit cards as well, since prepaid credit cards minimize the risk that a company will not get the money they need to remain profitable out of their high risk (bad credit) credit card customer segment.

The Buy Right credit card offers the following features for those with not the greatest credit :

1.) No credit check, since they specialize in high risk credit, this would kind of defeat the purpose, and alienate potential customers who are looking to repair their credit through securing credit lines and regaining financial independence.

2.) The Buy Right bad credit program features a credit rebuilding program which boasts many products for sale online for purchase which are specifically in their credit rebuilding program to help those in need of credit repair build a credit history back up.

3.) The special bad credit credit card program also offers people with bad credit the option to do direct deposit to recharge the prepaid credit cards so that they never run out of credit on this credit rebuilding program.

Again, a little off the credit card and prime rate offers topic, but I just subscribed to the free website that you may have seen ads for before if you frequent financial news sites at all, called MotleyFool.com. It’s this really cool website that kind of explains investing in laymen’s terms and really gets your mind going to places you never thought possible with what you can do with your money and how you actually can learn to invest your own money with some research and practice at picking good stocks and other short and long term investments.

The really cool thing is that when I signed up for my free “subscription” to the Motley Fool website, I got an offer to recieve two free weeks of Investor’s Business Daily which is a paper that is supposed to be very good for doing your daily research on what’s going on in Wall Street, and also just to keep abreast of the important financial news, including what the Fed’s gonna due with interest rates and other general interest money topics that we should all really be keeping on top of, since some of it directly affects our financial well being and financial lives.

I’ll let you know once I start receiving the paper. I’m hoping that I have time to read it! I also hope it’s easy to cancel with no catches if I decide it simply isn’t being put to good enough use for me to keep reading it and getting it in the mail. I’ll keep you posted! Oh yeah, I also got a free two week trial for their online version of the paper, I think it’s called Investors.com or something like that.

Everyone has different new year’s resolutions, and many times they involve losing weight or quitting smoking, but an increasing amount of people who are sick and tired of being financially behind and not as financially comfortable as they think they should be at this point in their life, are resolvign to make some very hefty financial resolutions for themselves.

What should your financial resolution be, or what is your financial resolution if you already have thought of one? I’ll tell you what mine is. It’s to stop spending money on things that disappear quickly, like fast food meals, or restaurant meals that cost upwards of thirty bucks a pop. Also, I have a tendency to think that the little splurges don’t add up, like the Starbuck’s coffee for $4 or that bottled water for a dollar or so at the store.

Every little bit does count, and since I am in the habit of using my debit card now for almost everything, it is traceable, and I can hold myself accountable for the little money I spend “here and there” and see that it is not just a little bit of money at all at the end of the month, but rather could pay an entire bill of some sort, and add to my savings and retirement accounts!